Business Ethics

Chapter 12, the last applied ethics chapter, considers some controversies in business. How should a firm’s owners, and related agents such as managers or state bank directors, engage with others, particularly workers and consumers? The chapter argues that the communal ethic does a better job of accounting for intuitions about who counts as a stakeholder and how to prioritize amongst competing stakeholder interests than does utilitarianism or Kantianism. Roughly, rightness as friendliness entails that not all duties of beneficence are a function of need or voluntary assumption of obligation to aid; a firm can also have pro tanto moral reason to help parties because it has related on friendly terms with them in the past. The chapter also takes up the question of how the production process ought to be structured, arguing that while the Western moral theories could well allow an unconstrained managerialism, the communal ethic probably does not.

Biomedical Ethics

Chapter 9 addresses the duties of medical practitioners such as doctors and nurses, mostly in relation to patients, but also in respect of each other and their society. It argues that the relational moral theory is at least no worse than, and is often to be preferred over, more Western principles when it comes to how to understand several biomedical obligations. For example, the chapter maintains that the communal ethic makes good sense of whom a medical professional has moral reason to treat and for which purposes. It further contends that rightness as friendliness grounds moderate positions on abortion and euthanasia that many will find convincing but that utilitarianism and Kantianism have difficulty entailing and explaining. For example, if utilitarianism and Kantianism permit abortion, it is hard for them to avoid also permitting infanticide, but the relational ethic can more easily avoid that implication.

The distinct moral importance of acting together

This review essay engages with Garrett Cullity’s argument that there is a fundamental moral norm of cooperation, as articulated in Concern, Respect, & Cooperation (2018). That is to say that there is moral reason to participatein collective endeavours that cannot be reduced to other moral reasons like promoting welfare. If this is plausible, all the better for solving collective action dilemmas like climate change. But how should we understand a reason of participation? I supplement Cullity’s own account by appealing to the notion of ‘team reasoning’ in game theory. Even if not an adequate notion of rationality, adopting the team stance—deriving individual reasonto act from what a group may together achieve—may well have distinct moral importance.

More Right than Wrong

This paper argues that Ross, despite the importance and innovativity of his conception of a prima facie duty, fails entirely to make sense of the relation between prima facie duty, as he understands it, and duty proper. He thus fails to make any sense of what it is to be a moral reason for action, and of right-making and wrong-making properties. Basing my approach on some suggestions of Prichard’s, I suggest that the only way to do this is to abandon any distinct conception of duty proper, restricting ourselves to the idea of what we have most duty to do – what we most ought to do. This retains, but reframes, Ross’s focus on something that is a matter of degree.

Moral Disagreement in Anglican – Roman Catholic Relations

The belief that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches were divided by moral disagreements came to prominence in the early 1980s and affected the direction of ecumenical dialogue. But no moral disagreements go back to the Reformation era, and the perception of moral difference has undergone many changes since that time, especially reflecting differences of social and political setting. A moral agreement or disagreement is difficult to chart with precision. It is not embodied in a formulation of moral doctrine, since moral reason functions on two planes, that of evaluative description and that of deliberation and decision. Disagreement is phenomenologically present as offence, which has its own dynamic of expansion. Addressing offence, a task involving lay, theological and episcopal contributions, is the primary way in which moral agreement has to be sought and defended.

Benefiting from Wrongdoing and Moral Protest

Some normative theorists believe that there is a principled moral reason not to retain benefits realized by injustice or wrongdoing. However, critics have argued that this idea is implausible. One purported problem is that the idea lacks an obvious rationale and that attempts to provide one have been unconvincing. This paper articulates and defends the idea that the principled reason in question has an expressive quality: it gets its reason-giving force from the symbolic aptness of such an act as an expressive response to wrongdoing. The paper thus argues that at least in a certain subset of cases, renouncing benefits realized by injustice amounts to a powerful and uniquely apt expression of protest against the disrespect for the victim that is implied by the wrongdoer’s actions. The paper shows how this idea can inform the question of reparations for slavery and its aftermath in the United States. Lastly it develops an important objection to the argument presented and gives an account of how this objection can be met.

Morality and Tribalism

This contribution has two main goals which might be labelled for convenience as a pars construens and pars denstruens reversing the usual order of these terms. The first aim is to offer an overview of the main tenets of the book, while the second aim is to raise some critical concerns while remaining sympathetic to the author’s overall project. With regard to the first point, I present the context of intellectual debate where Buchanan’s contribution fits comfortably: Darwin’s evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, moral analysis etc. The target here is to show the internal complexity and different layers of analysis of the book. These initial reconstructions are, next, used to formulate some thoughts on what I consider possible problematic points in need of clarification. In particular, first, I hold that Buchanan presents too narrow oppositional views between intergroup relations whereupon the notion of “tribalism” is constructed. Such strong identitarian conception does not seem to depict adequately the sociological dynamics of intergroup relations. Second, I consider the terms in which it can be addressed the notion of the rise of the moral mind in evolutionary terms. The suggestion is to consider in a milder form the author’s key concept of a “Great Uncoupling” for the moral reason.

On the Moral Functions of Language

Previous comparisons of language and morality have taken a cognitively internalist (i.e., within-minds) perspective. We take a socially externalist (i.e., between-minds) perspective, viewing both language and morality as forms of social action. During human evolution, social cognitive adaptations for cooperation evolved, including cooperative communication (social acts to mentally coordinate with others for common goals) and social normativity (social acts to regulate cooperative social relationships). As human cooperation scaled up in complexity, cooperative communication and social normativity scaled up as well, leading to the development of culturally elaborated forms of language and morality. Language facilitates all aspects of morality and is even necessary for certain aspects. Humans use language to (1) initiate, (2) preserve, (3) revise, and (4) act on morality in ways such as forming joint commitments, teaching norms, modifying social realities, and engaging in moral reason-giving.

The Problem of Recognition of Human Rights: Does Explicative-Existential Justification Really Work?

This paper analyses Robert Alexy’s explicative-existential justification of human rights. The author identifies several problems that are associated with it. An analysis of Alexy’s explicative argument suggests that it cannot cope with the transition from facts to norms. Notably, this argument does not explain why its requirements cannot be overruled by some other moral reason (for example, the utility principle). The answer that Alexy offers in his existential argument is not considered sufficient by the author of this paper. Although this argument complements the necessary normative premises, the existential decision preferred by Alexy is not the only one necessary. It can be admitted that for many people such a decision is attractive. However, even if we accept that explicative-existential justification is credible in some context, it is correct to apply it only to the rights of persons and not to the rights of human beings. In the final part, the author shows that the claim that this theory can justify even the rights of human beings who are not persons is indefensible.

The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism

This handbook contains thirty-two previously unpublished contributions to consequentialist ethics by leading scholars, covering what’s happening in the field today as well as pointing to new directions for future research. Consequentialism is a rival to such moral theories as deontology, contractualism, and virtue ethics. But it’s more than just one rival among many, for every plausible moral theory must concede that the goodness of an act’s consequences is something that matters even if it’s not the only thing that matters. Thus, all plausible moral theories will accept both that the fact that an act would produce good consequences constitutes a moral reason to perform it and that the better that act’s consequences the greater the moral reason there is to perform it. Now, if this is correct, then much of the research concerning consequentialist ethics is important for ethics in general. For instance, one thing that consequentialist researchers have investigated is what sorts of consequences matter: the consequences that some act would have or the consequences that it could have—if, say, the agent were to follow up by performing some subsequent act. And it’s reasonable to suppose that the answer to such questions will be relevant for normative ethics regardless of whether the goodness of consequences is the only thing that matters (as consequentialists presume) or just one of many things that matter (as nonconsequentialists presume).